Search: Habits vs Environments
June 2, 2008
In 1980, when you launched the Dialog Information Service search function, the system dumped you into a database about education. From that starting point, you entered a file number. Experienced searchers memorized file numbers; type b 15 and you would be “in” the ABI / INFORM business information file. Type b 16 and you would be able to search PROMT, a collection of business data. Dialog never saw bulletin board systems or the Internet coming.
People fortunate enough to have the money and technical savvy could become online searchers. The technology was sufficiently clumsy and the entire process so unfamiliar to most people as to make online searching an arcane art. Searching in those early days was handled by an intermediary. When I first learned about online databases at Booz, Allen & Hamilton in 1976, the intermediary was the New York office’s boss. I would call the intermediary, explain what I needed, provide a project number, and pick up the outputs on weird thermal paper later that day. As clumsy and expensive as the process was, it was more efficient than doing research with paper journals, printed books, and the horrific microfilm.
By 1983, Dialog had found a market for its mainframe-based search system–librarians. Librarians had two characteristics that MBAs, lawyers, and folks trained in brochure making lacked. First, librarians chose a discipline that required an ability to think about categories. Librarians also understood the importance of having a standard way to identify authors, titles, and subjects.
Second, librarians had a budget to meet the needs of people described as an “end user”. Some of my Booz, Allen colleagues would rush into our corporate library and demand, “Give me everything on ECCS!”
The approach taken by Systems Development (SDC Orbit), BRS (Bibliographic Retrieval Service), DataStar, and the handful of other online vendors was monetized in clever ways. First, a company would pay money to sign up to get a password. Second, the company would send the librarian to training programs. Most programs were free and taught tips and tricks to tame the naked command line. No graphical user interface.
You had to memorize command strings like this one.SS UD=9999 and CC=76?. The system then spit out the most recent records about marketing. The key point is not the complexity. The point is that you had to form specific habits to make the system work. Make an error and the system would deliver nothing useful. Search and retrieval was part puzzle, part programming, and part memorization. At the time, I believed that these habits would be difficult to break. I think the vendors saw their users as hooked on online in the way a life long smoker is hooked on nicotine.
The vendors were wrong. The “habit” was not a habit. The systems were confining, hellishly expensive, and complicated to such a degree that change was hard for vendor. Change for the people who knew how to search was easy. The automatic behavior that worked so well in 1980 began to erode when PCs became available. When the first browser became available, the old solid gold revenue streams started to slip. The intermediaries who controlled online were disintermediated. The stage was set for the Internet, lowest-common-denominator searching, and graphical interfaces. The Internet offered useful information for free. I have dozens of examples of online budgets slashed or eliminated because neither the vendor nor the information professional could explain the value of online information. A visible, direct cost with no proof of payback crippled the original online industry. Many of the companies continue to hang on today, but these firms are in a race that is debilitating. Weaker companies in the commercial database business will find survival more and more difficult.
The notion of online habits persists. There’s a view that once a user has learned one way to perform an online or digital task, it’s game over for competitors. That’s not true. New customer constituencies come into being, and the people skilled in complex, specialized systems can carve out a niche. But hockey stick growth and fat margins are increasingly unlikely for traditional information companies.
Why Try for Control?
The reason a vendor tries to create a service that gives complete control is simple. Money. When you can lock in a customer, you are locking out a competitor. One of the most successful information sales techniques pioneered in the commercial database world was the free trial. Once you got “shelf space”, you were in a position to make the short jump from test to standing order. The brilliance of Microsoft’s salad days boiled down to getting Word into everyone’s hands and then charging for upgrades.
The past still lives on. For example, when I read this interesting write up in Information Week by Thomas Claburn, I started thinking about defaults, when they can hide, and habits of users. You should read this article “Microsoft Strikes Search Deal with HP” yourself. As you know, once one of these stories ages, the Information Week Web site search function is often maddening. You can find the article here.
The title says it all. Microsoft has cut a deal with Hewlett Packard to install the Microsoft Live Search tool bar on new HP computers. The idea is that a user will find switching from the default search system to a competitive search system too much work. The HP deal is another paving stone on Microsoft’s path to catch up with Google and cut off its oxygen supply. I don’t think it will make any significant difference. Today, a user can switch to another search system or tool bar with a mouse click.
To put this toolbar into perspective, you can choose from a large number of tool bars. Like anti-virus software, tool bars can conflict with one another. The interactions can create some excitement, particularly for novice Windows Vista users. Among the tool bars I have tested are:
You get the idea. There are many different features and functions in these tool bars. You can download them and see what you think. You may find it useful to make an image of your hard drive. Instead of uninstalling these little bundles of code, you can replace the partition with out trying to figure out if the Google uninstaller got the goodies sprinkled on your system.
Getting on the customer’s desktop and installing what some have termed crapware is a finely-machined marketing technique. The only problem is that I don’t think it works very well.
An Environment, Not a Habit
Today the ability to change from one site to another in a browser is trivially easy. I click away when pages don’t load at Google speed. I don’t think anything about leaving NewsNow.co.uk and jumping to EuFeeds.eu when I don’t find what I am looking for in a second or two.
It took Dialog’s library customers years to feel comfortable with the Internet. Today’s online users don’t have habits. The information ecosystem is larger and less sticky than the old-style Dialog or BRS experience.
Fish don’t see the water.
Many organization’s try to lock down employees’ access to the Internet. At the pre-crash BearStearns, I saw elaborate security procedures to put a digital wall between the firm’s internal information and “the Internet.” Everything worked fine until I fired up my laptop and connected using my Verizon card.
More important to me is getting the information I need to do my work. My habit is to work in my ecosystem. Therefore, lock ins and lock downs don’t work too well for some professionals. There’s a mental age demographic at work I think. I know that many of the young people with whom I work at companies around the world want information their way.
Google aims to please this demographic. In effect, Google is competing by making information services available that are like fish to the water. I don’t think that Google is targeting Microsoft or any company directly. Google is attacking via seepage into a “mental demographic”. Google likes to work with customers who “get it.” If you don’t get it, Google doesn’t want that customer.
I’ve heard Googlers say on more than one occasion: “I need to use Microsoft Excel on my Macbook for some things.”
Google is content muddling forward with its educational programs. A number of interesting universities have “gone Google”; for example, Arizona State University. Google and IBM are pumping up computer curricula to produce programmers who can do distributed, massively parallel programs. Google makes betas available and supports the products and services that gets clicks. In general, Google gets a D in marketing and sales. One East coast Google office has a reputation for scheduling meetings and then phoning at the last minute to say, “We’re stuck on the Metro.” Baloney. Google is not very adept at traditional sales and marketing. Google is good at ecosystem and demographic marketing. The idea is to let the young in mental years make the sales and do the marketing.
Google is moving–although slowly–in the enterprise market. The slowness with which Google takes obvious actions. Google seems to be focused on younger users. The idea is to get these future enterprise customers comfortable with Google. Allow these youngsters to explore, make and break habits, get comfortable with the non-directive Google.
When these younger users enter the work force, they will bring Google with them. The idea is that Google is part of their fabric. It is not a habit; it is a way of interacting with information.
Some Implications
If I am correct, the Google approach poses a significant threat to Microsoft. It also threatens IBM and Oracle. Google poses a risk to traditional telcos and to the entertainment industry that will be largely unaffected by the Viacom litigation which is about control.
No matter what the legal decision, Google’s infrastructure allows the company to deliver different applications to its users. The incremental cost to Google for each application is low. The flow of innovations acts like catnip for the demographic at which Google is aiming. The idea is that Google doesn’t have to push its products. As its users enter the work force, the Google products come along.
The difference between the Dialog approach of the 1980s, and the Google approach is one that Google’s competitors have yet to appreciate fully. Google is not a habit; it’s an environment. A different type of lock in is needed. A deal with HP isn’t enough. Google is seeping, migrating like ink spilled on a linen table cloth. Once freed from the container, the impact is significant, tough to stop, and almost impossible to undo.
Stephen Arnold, June 3, 2008
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